Tag Archive for: EMFcamp

Claire Christmas

Electromagnetic Field 2022

/0 Comments/in /by

As people enjoyed the 4 day Jubilee UK Bank holiday with street parties, parades and union jack bunting, Dogsbody Technology staff spent the weekend in a field at Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire for Electromagnetic Field 2022 (EMF Camp).

The event is every 2 years and Dogsbody are no stranger to it having attended three previous EMF’s… but the last one was in 2018 with 2020 (of course) being cancelled.

If anyone asks what Electromagnetic Field is we say “Glastonbury for Geeks”. Featuring super fast 1Gbps symmetrical internet connection and power to your tent, robots galore, multiple geodesic domes, enough LED to see from space, laser beams and tons of workshops, talks and a free to play arcade. This is our kinda place.

The event is also family friendly with childcare and youth workshops available so you can take the kids (if you really want too).

There were hundreds of things to see and do over the 4 day weekend, including 144 talks and 79 workshops. Some of the talks were recorded, we’ll add the relevant links to these once they are live.

Each year, as part of the ticket price, you get a badge…..but this is no ordinary badge.

This years had an array of features including a USB-C plug, display, joystick and buttons. It can connect to wifi and has an app store.

It even has a cryptographic accelerator chip meaning it can be used as a hardware authentication device (equivalent to a YubiKey).

Our favourite bits…

Picking a favourite part of EMF Camp 2022 is hard but here are some of the highlights Dogsbody took away with them.


Claire:This is my 4th EMF camp and everyone has been different. This year I attended less talks but completed a Puzzlehunt – why? Cause we wanted to see what was behind the door in the now infamous Null Sector! We did and it was awesome! Thank you to Dreamcatcher for the hard work that went into creating it!

I also love the commitment people put into creating the fun… EMF Ducks and emfSpiders are my new favourite EMF Camp twitter feeds.

Josh: What struck me most about emf camp is it’s scale, openness, diversity and detail. The more you look the more you see. The more you do the more you find. You can dive deep into one thing or spread yourself and try to absorb it all. Which you won’t be able to do and I’m quite sure that if I could turn back time and rerun the event I could have a wholly unique experience several times over.

From puzzles to arcade games, algorithmic raves to karaoke, geodesic domes to Kraken’s and fire tornadoes – you’ll never see it all. And that’s OK. Serendipity is the joy of it and you just surf the highs – getting top score on Nameco Point Blank; and the lows – sitting alone on a bench in the wind and rain, crying into a burrito having just watched ‘An Engineer’s Guide to Grief’ and stewing on it’s gaze into the abyss of loss.

Most seriously, I’m grateful EMF Camp exists. It serves as a reminder that there are like-minded people out there in the world, people interested in the things you are and open to the things you think, even if your everyday lived experience couldn’t be further from that reality. Four days wasn’t quite enough to lower shields raised to a lifetime of endured indifference. But it did offer a glimpse of what could be. And anyway, there’s always next time.

Ashley: As a Space and Statistics fan, the Astro Pi Mark II talk was one of my favourites. The presentation followed a standard Raspberry pi from the factory in Wales, through rigorous international testing with NASA and everywhere in between. Ending with the Pi finally ending up, fully intact and working, on the International Space Station. In addition to the journey, Richard Hayler gave an explanation of Mission Zero, a Python challenge for young people under 19 to code their own programs to be deployed and run on the International Space Station, something I know my daughter and I will taking a look at.

My main highlight though, has to be melting some brains and destroying everyone at FLUX.

Dan: Where to start! Every time we go to EMF I am in awe of the dedication of everyone that attends. It is the living embodiment of the old adage that the right group of people coming together can easily be greater than the sum of their parts. I’ve seen so many people riffing off of something that someone else said.

Where else will you see event information being distributed by a fully working Teletext system to CRT TV’s around the site…

The highlight for me has to be watching an entire tent erupt into a singalong version of Evanescence (Bring Me To Life) inspired by our own Ashley and Josh. It has already gone down as folklore in the office and I think there may even be a video somewhere but that maybe embargoed 🙂

Stats and Thanks

We geeks love a stat, so here are some from the event:

  • 2,636 checked in (attended)
  • 556 volunteered whilst the event was running, manning talks, videoing talks, logistics, helping in the shop etc
  • 10,800 unique devices seen on the network ( an average of ±3.6 device per visitor)

EMF camp is a completely non-profit event and is entirely organised and run by a dedicated team of volunteers. Whilst we were onsite for 4 days, volunteers had been on-site setting up, and tearing down afterwards, for almost 2 weeks!

A BIG Thank you to all the people who make this event possible!

Here are some of our favourite photos from this years event.

 

Gary Rixon

EMF Camp 2018 – A Field Full of Nerds

/3 Comments/in /by

From the 31st of August – 2nd September 2018, Dogsbody Technology attended Electromagnetic Field, in the grounds of Eastnor Castle Deer Park, in Herefordshire. It was a fun packed weekend, with talks and workshops on a huge variety of subjects, from blacksmithing to knitting, soldering to giant walking hexapods!

How was it?

The whole weekend was brilliant, and the energy when you’re there is amazing. There is a real sense of community and friendship amongst everybody, many of whom have never even met before. There’s no such thing as a silly question at EMF, if you want to know more about something, just ask; there will be lots of people willing to help you out. There are some very clever people present, so there are many opportunities for learning, and teaching too.

Power and Internet

One of the more unique aspects of EMF is the fact that you get power and super fast internet to your tent/village. This year, a ludicrously quick 1Gbps symmetrical connection was provided. This is a fast circuit for a permanent installation, let alone one for a ~3 day event (not forgetting the amazing volunteers who’d been on site for nearly 10 days when all was said and done!)

Villages

Campers are allowed, and encouraged, to set up villages on the site. These are basically collections of tents/structures where people camp together so they can work on similar projects, or just enjoy the company of other like minded people. Whilst Dogsbody didn’t have a “village” as such, we all camped together and had a communal space for hacking / eating / chatting etc. Here’s most of us hacking on our badges (more on these in a while)

Badge hacking at camp Dogsbody

The Talks / Workshops

EMF 2018 was the biggest yet, and it was packed full of content. There were roughly 120 talks, 74 workshops, 20 performances and 43 other events. And they were all amazing! There’s obviously too much stuff to discuss here, so I’ve asked the rest of the company to tell me a little about their favourite parts:

Friday night at EMF Camp was amazing – 100 watts of lasers, Fire…Professor Elemental live and seeing the Null Sector for the first time was incredible. I’m a sucker for multi coloured lights

– Claire

As a regular user of the trains, I was drawn to the railway signalling talk. I often jokingly write the trains off as hopeless and incompetent but as we all know everything is always more complex than it first appears so this was a great place to get a better idea as to what keeps going wrong. The talk was interesting, informative and well delivered.

Here are some of the things that fall under “a signalling problem”:

  • Keeping track of where the trains are (this is often done by putting a battery on the track or a small box to count the axles as they pass it).
  • Making sure you aren’t too close to the train in front (is usually done by either splitting the track into zones and only allowing one train per zone or by keeping track of the zone in front of each train that it will need to safely stop).
  • Signalling the driver and making sure the fail safes are working in case they miss / ignore the signal.

Just from these things you end up with a huge number of ways for the trains to be delayed to ensure passenger safety.

– Jim

My favourite talk was Boiling nemo – make your own internet of things. Which detailed out the presenters descent into IoT madness, after his fish tank malfunctioned he set up a Raspberry Pi to monitor it.

He slowly takes his home IoT further and further until at the end he is comparing “Big data” with a graph showing his son leaving for school (later and later!).

My other highlight was watching Hackers, it is one of those movies that is so much better with a crowd. HACK THE PLANET!

– Rob

The Cracking HiTag2 Crypto talk was very interesting as I’ve always wondered how they work. Learning that as well as how to crack them was indeed fascinating. The way you can crack and copy them is seriously impressive and now I’ve seen how all of that is done I want to go myself.

– Chris

The talk from from two hackers that at the age of 16 were banned from using any encryption technology for 5 years was fascinating.  It’s very clear that the UK police service has a long way to go before they even know what to do with criminals in an online world.  With the UN declaring the internet now being a basic human right and the push for encryption of all online content over the last few years there can easily be a disconnect between punishment and rehabilitation.

– Dan

At the time of writing, all of the happenings of EMF 2018 are detailed here and videos of all of the talks can be found here

Badges

The badges at EMF are truly unique. Most conferences give you a name badge which has your name on it, along with maybe your occupation / job title etc. EMF goes above and beyond this quite stratospherically, giving you badges which are small, hackable microcontrollers. This year, along with the now “standard” screen and LEDs, this year’s badges had fully functional mobile phones built in. And these connected to… the fully functional GSM mobile network that was set up on site. We could write an entire post on the badges and what they’re capable of (which we may well do at some point), so I’ll just have to leave you with some pictures for now (note the SIM card above the battery wires in the second picture)

 

Summary

We all had a blast at EMF 2018, and we’re already looking forward to EMF 2020, which we hope to attend. We really don’t know what the organisers are going to do next, but we’re sure it’s gonna be mega.

If you attended EMF 2018 and have anything to share, please leave a comment below.

Here are some of our favourite photos from this years event.

Gary Rixon

Electromagnetic Field 2016 – An Amazing Weekend

/1 Comment/in /by

This weekend we attended Electromagnetic Field (EMF) in Guildford. EMF is all about making things, breaking things, fixing them again, and learning a whole lot of stuff whilst you’re doing it, either directly through your hacking and experimentation, or via any of the fantastic talks and workshops, of which there were many.

We headed to EMF on Friday, which started as any normal day at the office; arrive at 9am, sort your tickets and have a cup of tea.

With the everyday stuff in order, it was time to head to EMF. This was my first time at EMF, and I must say it was AWESOME! Some of my colleagues had been before and told me great things, but I didn’t realise it was going to meet, and beat, my expectations so swiftly and so completely.

I was not completely sure what to expect, but as soon as I arrived at the site, you could really feel the excitement, with people looking forward to what was to be an awesome weekend. Everybody at EMF was very friendly, and everybody was there for the same reason; to learn and have fun. We got our (awesome) camp set up and said hello to the neighbours.

The Dogsbody Technology camp site at EMF 2016

The Dogsbody Technology camp site at EMF 2016

The variety of topics and talks was endless, from balloons to beer, and from security to sex robots, there really was something for everyone!

One of my favourite talks was from freakyclown who makes his living gaining access to various establishments and businesses in order to test their security. He explained how with nothing more than a hi-vis, a clip-board and a lot of confidence, you could work your way into some seriously secure places. It was actually a bit frightening to hear just how easy it is to breach certain security measures. A very well-prepared and well-presented talk, providing awesome insight into what is otherwise a fairly secretive (with good reason) industry. It also looks like freakyclown enjoyed giving his talk as much as we loved watching it.

Another talk that caught, and held, my interest was WhiteSpace by Beth Healey. The talk consisted of Beth telling us about her long stint at Concordia, one of the most remote and hostile locations on the planet, where she carried out research and experiments. Although amazing in itself, the data gathered on Beth and her colleagues during their time at Concordia would later be used by ESA and NASA to see how people coped in the extreme conditions, which will help them when we finally get around to sending people on a very long, manned missions to other planets in our solar system. Very exciting stuff!

Now I could talk literally all day about all of the fantastic things we did, people we met, and contraptions we created, but as the saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words. So here’s some of our favourite snaps from the weekend. Please leave some comments below and share your thoughts if you went along to EMF, we’d love to hear what you got up to! We will also be updating this blog post with links to slides and videos from the talks when they become available, so do check back.

Sadly EMF is only on every two years, but it will be back in 2018, and I’m sure the Dogsbody Technology team will again be in attendance. See you there!

Claire Christmas

See you at Electromagnetic Field 2016

/0 Comments/in /by

This weekend the Dogsbody Technology Team are packing up their tents and laptops and heading to Loseley Park, Guildford for Electromagnetic Field 2016.

Don’t know what Electromagnetic Field is – here is a description from their website:

Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.

A temporary town of more than a thousand like-minded people enjoying a long weekend of talks, performances, and workshops on everything from blacksmithing to biometrics, chiptunes to computer security, high altitude ballooning to lockpicking, origami to democracy, and online privacy to knitting.

To help matters along, we provide fast internet, power to the tent, good beer, and amazing installations, entirely organised by a dedicated team of volunteers.

Tickets were on sale in advance and are now sold out but come back here to see our review of the event next week.

Update: You can now see our write up of Electromagnetic Field 2016.

If you are attending feel free to come say hi and have a drink with us

Like the idea of attending these sorts of event with us! We are Hiring. You could be joining us at our next event 🙂